I’m in a silly mood.
This job does that to you sometimes, especially on days when you’re reduced to stalking authors in order to get in touch with them or changing all the lower-case instances of the letter ‘k’ in a document to upper-case (and you can’t cheat and use MS Word’s special tools for venal tasks like these because you might miss one, or accidentally change a k to a K when it ought to be a k). Or of course, today’s task: making ever smaller zipped folders of the figures from a textbook and uploading them to the web catalogue one at a time because the damn thing doesn’t like it if you try to upload 75MB worth of figures at once. It’s temperamental like that.
But better silly than disgruntled, eh?
As the first month of 2012 comes to a close, I’ve come to the following conclusions:
- There are some mind-bogglingly stupid people in the world. Whether it’s shouting about how homosexuality ISN’T A CHOICE, DAMN YOU, or worrying about how liberal philosophies and critical thinking are un-American, or even labouring under the misapprehension that all Indian women see their sexuality as part of the cult of Shakti (I kid you not), or lying to Salman Rushdie about all the big bad assassins out to kill him at the Jaipur LitFest, it all comes down to the same thing: sometimes, people just don’t want to see themselves as repositories of rationality, critical judgement and empathy. Ah well. Good luck to them.
- I’m even more hopelessly contradictory than I always thought I was. Show me a disinterested man, and I’ll pursue him to the ends of the earth. Show me an interested one, and I’ll find a million things wrong with him. I’ll read a million things into text messages and forget to actually listen to people when they’re right there in front of me, attempting to communicate verbally. Oh and my personal favourite, I expend hours and hours of energy, time and thought on things that, ordinarily, would recede to the depths of my terrible memory in a matter of seconds. It is my fervent hope that somebody in the wide world will look past these hideous traits and see the hapless idiot within, take pity on her fumbling attempts to connect to other human beings and say ‘here, honey, don’t try so hard. I love you anyway.’.
- It’s all in the mind. Whether it’s exploring new genres or meeting people whom you have nothing in common with or having a sucky day, what you say to yourself has a lot to do with it. Actually having to type this here makes me feel like one of the stupid people referred to in point number one, but it had to be said. As Hector discovered in the book I finished last night (Hector and the Search for Happiness, by Francois Lelord), happiness is a way of looking at things.
Back to building web pages now!
